Databases are used to store and provide access to a large proportion of digital information. As current databases have capacity to store large volumes of data and provide many thousands of users with access to the digital information, they have been widely deployed by large and mid-sized businesses. The integrity of the digital information in a database is paramount.
Systems for providing access to the digital information contained in a database are known in the art. Many of these database access systems comprise an application server associated with the database through which a set of clients may access the database. The application server may perform numerous operations including controlling access to the database to prevent clients from performing unauthorized actions, converting client data into a format and protocol used for accessing the database, and sequencing the database requests.
Application servers relay client requests to the database via database connections without any regard for the operations they may contain. The application servers receive the database requests from the client side of the application server and provide for the processing of the database requests. Processing the database requests involves one or more database connections. The setup and tear-down of connections involves connection control processing and signaling for each of the database connections. As there are many of these database connections concurrently maintained at the database, significant processing and transmission resources are occupied at the database, the application server, and the communications equipment extending therebetween.
While the signaling and processing of the connection setup and release is a load that degrades the performance of the application server and the communications equipment, these penalties can be mitigated relatively inexpensively by adding or upgrading application servers and increasing capacity of data network 18 as required. However, the penalty incurred at the database that receives, processes and generates one side of the connection setup and release signaling is not likewise overcome by duplication. It is not possible to duplicate the digital information of the database for access purposes without sacrificing consistency and integrity of the digital information. Duplication of the digital information leads to intractable problems with keeping the copies of the digital information consistent. Thus an inherent bottleneck exists where the modifications to the digital information takes place.
Accordingly, there is a need for a DBMS that reduces a connection control workload of a resource base, particularly if it provides for a more efficient use of resource base connections to reduce the number of connections to the resource base. Further a method of delivering resource requests in a sorted format to a resource base is needed. The need for such a system has heretofore been unsatisfied.